Search Results: Gaza

While the Australian Jewish population is about 0.4 per cent, they constitute about 12.5 per cent of the Wentworth electorate, with Christianity the largest group overall (43.8 per cent). It is highly likely the LNP is counting on the embassy stunt to result in more votes in the Wentworth by-election. But the political ramifications are much broader.

'If only we could sit down with Palestinians for a bowl of hummus, all the problems would be solved,' says my Israeli friend, as we wipe hummus down with warm pita. He isn't the first to say this. Indeed, a film was made about the virtues of hummus, which asked if a regional love of hummus be the recipe for peace. Personally, I'm not so sure.

A little over 77 years ago, Allied forces fighting in northern Greece were overwhelmed by German strength. In Kalamata, for years now there has been a wreath-laying ceremony at a memorial close to the waterfront. It occurs days before the Nakba, the remembrance of Palestinian displacement that this year marked 70 years.

While Jews around the world celebrated Passover, other people protested their right to return home, as the Palestinian 'Great March of Return' was launched on the Gaza Strip. The night that Jews globally celebrated freedom, 19 Palestinians were killed and over 1000 injured because they rightfully demanded theirs.

Speak out against Israeli policies towards Palestinians and you are betraying fellow Jews. This narrative is common, and we see it today in relation to human rights organisations in Israel. It is not new. The same thing occured decades ago, when scholar Gershom Scholem accused Hannah Arendt, the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, of lacking 'love of the Jewish people'.

On 15 May, Palestinians and our allies all over the world commemorate the Nakba. In Arabic, Nakba means 'catastrophe', and it refers to the violent displacement of Palestinians that began in 1948. Growing up in Palestine, I know that while the Nakba started in 1948, Palestinians have been living under a continuous Nakba since then: the Nakba didn't end, it's ongoing. For me, the Nakba is when a foreign regime determines my and my family's movements on a land we lived on for generations.

Some things are invisible until pointed out. Take the water tanks that pepper the rooves of buildings and homes in the West Bank. 'That's how you tell between Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements,' a friend points out. 'The Palestinian homes need water tanks because of restricted water supply from Israel, whereas the settlements don't.' Access to clean water is a fundamental human right, and the water situation in Palestine reveals a cruel privileging of one group over another.

When she fell, at last, out of this life, I caught him as intended, solid as belief ... eyes raised, palms turned to Mecca, his fixed magnetic pole. A Vienna bronze, perhaps 1920s, most likely a Jewish workshop - a fusion of metals and cultures, before Holocaust, West Bank or Gaza; a figure in robes, on a small carpet, its yellows and reds realistically creased, his sandals ... Aesthetics ranked high in her life - a second, earthly religion - all the style she could afford in the world her parents had fled to.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Australia this week is having precisely the opposite impact to what he no doubt intended. Instead of shoring up support for Israel's flagrant disregard for United Nations resolutions condemning its continual annexation of Palestinian land, it is driving a deep wedge into what was previously unflagging bipartisan Australian political party support for Israel. Australia's connection with Palestine actually predates the creation of the state of Israel.

This week, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that although 'some of you will not believe' it, he 'cares more about Palestinians than their leaders do'. He is right - I don't believe him, not least because what he is saying is nothing new. Israel has long been claiming that it only harms Palestinians because Palestinians force them to do it. As well as making Israel sound remarkably like an abusive partner (Why did you have to go and make me hit you?) this is also Dehumanisation 101.

It was two years ago this month, in July 2014, that my flight touched down in Ben Gurion Airport half an hour later than scheduled. There were rumours of Hamas missiles landing in the vicinity of the airport. A few days later multiple airlines announced they were ceasing travel to Israel. What would become Israel's deadliest offensive in Gaza since the Second Intifada, 'Operation Protective Edge', was entering its second week. How did it come to this?

Benjamin Netanyahu's historical revisionism last week essentially blaming Palestinians for the Holocaust was much more than just empty rhetoric. Demonising the Palestinians is how he sets the stage for the west's acceptance of the Israeli Occupation: the more he dehumanises them, the more brutality Israel gets away with. The context that gets lost along the way is the link that exists between Palestinian actions and the abysmal living conditions imposed on them by the Occupation.